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Tuesday

Julie Bindel

Italian food purists need to calm down

Last year, a large group of young people gathered outside the Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s most popular attractions, to protest against ‘food crimes’ committed by tourists in Italy. Armed with signs reading ‘No more cream in carbonara’, ‘No more cappuccino with pasta’, and ‘Putting chicken in pasta is a crime in Italy’, they drew the attention of a large crowd of tourists. The protest was sparked by complaints from a number of the city’s restaurant owners about non-Italians (Americans in particular) asking for unorthodox ingredients to be added to the classics.  ‘If my customers want chicken in their pasta, and to them it tastes nice, then they will have it’ The organiser,

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

The Third Man fan’s guide to Vienna

The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and

Monday

Mary Dejevsky

Britain’s roads are becoming a Soviet nightmare

In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more territory than on foot. It seemed an innocent enough way of spending my time, and the traffic was blissfully light.  So I was surprised to receive – with remarkable speed – a Penalty Charge Notice for using what was called a prohibited road. The notice was supported by two photos of my car, which I

Sean Thomas

Why is Latin America so violent?

As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But then you notice the razorwire surrounding the nearby boutique. The armed guard outside the local bank. And you remember why this address, in the inner suburbs of Medellin Colombia, is notorious: this is where fugitive cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar was finally shot by cops in 1993 as he tried to flee across that roof.  Native

Ross Anderson

What next for the world of watches?

Every year, the world’s greatest watch companies and their biggest fans head to Geneva for an orgy of horological spectacle: Watches & Wonders. Here, companies pull out their latest, newest, most impressive goods, showing off the main products they intend to launch and the fans salivate and loosen their already pummelled wallets. It’s not a cheap hobby to be a watch lover.  The whole industry is in an odd place – and this was reflected in the watches displayed. In 2020 and 2021, the crypto and stock rush birthed lots of new-money millionaires who were eager to burn it all quickly, and Rolex, Patek and Audemars were happy to do the

Friday

Amber Duke

The plastic feminism of Barbie

Colombian pop singer Shakira caused quite the stir earlier this month when she revealed that her sons ‘absolutely hated’ the Barbie movie, which had a major cultural moment last year. Hot pink came back in fashion, people were hosting Barbie-themed parties and everyone was obsessing over lead Margot Robbie’s vintage Barbie-inspired clothing on the movie’s press tour. It was Barbie-mania, and the film earned $1.4 billion worldwide. Shakira’s family, though, weren’t fans of the global phenomenon. She said her nine- and 11-year-old sons didn’t enjoy the movie because they found it to be ‘emasculating’. And, she added, ‘I agree, to a certain extent’. To Shakira’s point, the movie tends to paint men and women as adversaries

Penworthy

Four bets for Aintree and beyond

My suggested ante-post bets for tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.) have featured prominently in this column for several weeks now. The good news is that these wagers are looking promising. My three long-term tips for the big Aintree spectacle were all put up at juicy prices that are long gone. My fourth Grand National bet, Desertmore House has – as I feared – narrowly failed to make the cut but that was NRNB (Non Runner No Bet), so there is no harm to anyone’s bank balance. So what of the chances of my three selections tomorrow now that the ground is likely to ride very soft? Mahler Mission, put

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Why we pity beautiful women

What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing to preserve her dignity dehumanises Marilyn – and we know that being treated as a ‘thing’ contributed towards her terminal sorrow. We want to have our cheesecake and eat it, without adding the heavy weight of posthumous complicity in the death of this likeable young woman – which is what Monroe was, beneath all the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The scrambling of Scrabble

When you’re playing a word game, don’t you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of word game be, like, collaborative – so that players helped each-other to celebrate their diversity rather than competing to, ugh, ‘win’?  This upside-down is a game which will bear the same relationship to Scrabble that tennis does to Junior Bake-Off Mattel has you covered. The company has announced that Scrabble sets will now have double-sided

Wednesday